Digital Amusement Game Development
  
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This awesome trippy world is what a bot will compute when figuring out where you are, plus q3 has to figure out how to draw the world based on this. As colorful and fun as this happy little world could be, it sucks. So, I went through and cleaned things up by first selecting all brushes in an object, adding func_group to them (just for consistancy), then while still selected, hit control-m to turn the brushes into detail brushes. Hint brushes care about structural brushes (which probably should be walls, floors, etc, big places that cause navigation decisions). Again, for the lowdown on exactly what's going on with hint brushes, I highly recommend reading this page. Now, what does my map look like after creating detail brushes? 
Oh ho ho ho!! So much better! That's it for today's pond, if you have feedback, see me at #fsk405 on ETG!
Over in GBA dev'ille, I have done little this week, except for talking to my guys about getting together to learn some of the dev tools out there. While things are quiet now, it's time for a breather. I'm looking at my upcoming unemployment, now thinking that even though I'll be getting a sizable severance, I've got to get back into making dough asap, be it a gaming position or not. That's fine though, I'll still have my free time to do my dev work. If you haven't noticed, the left side of the page has a little app that you can sign your name in. You should do that. Why? It's like peeing on a bush. The other bears will stay away then. :)
I received my GBA development kit! It consists of a USB to GBA cable, 128MB flash cartridge, and software. I got it up and running in no time flat. Big props to the hackers who have spent their time building a quality product. I've tested various third party demo games or just demos to see how they work on the GBA. The emulator is dead on, so there was no difference between running a GBA program on either the pc or GBA itself. Currently, for my amusement, I've got a simple image slideshow program on the flashcard now until I put something more useful there. Can you guess how long it took to taint my innocent GBA? :) Also, I've been asking around about whom may want to join my quest to create GBA games. I have a few friends who are very interested. What appears to be happening is I'm loosely pulling together a team! Optimally, and this is most certainly subject to change, is having 3 coders, 1 art person, 1 sound person, 1 storyboard person+, and 1 game designer/producer. I'd like to add a marketer of some sort in there too, but no money is exchanging hands over this whole project. Maybe substitute marketer with internal/external motivator? =D I'll be filling the role of the designer/producer, as well as being a coder for now. Depending on what happens, there may be a need for some kind of level designer. I'd like to end up seeing each person's involvement turning into a simple focus on their part, rather than everyone having to dip their hands in the other roles needed. Either way, it's my job to figure out everything first!
I'm trying to figure out how to optimize using the hardware because when warping the whole screen, I get like a frame every 2 seconds. On top of that, I couldn't get cos() to work for some reason, so I built a cosine table in perl and referenced it as an array. Lots of things I don't know about programming the GBA yet, but so far so good.
Next, I've been having lots of problems with making my win98 box compile maps correctly. It seems that any texture shader I make causes the map not to show the texture or shader at all. I've been away from my xp box for a couple days, so I will be doing research there to determine what's going on. A wily duck's pond is not just Urban Terror mapping, as noted by the title "Digital Amusement Game Development". My adrenilin is pumping as I've discovered Game Boy Advance development kits. Because of this, I have ordered a kit and will begin programming for the GBA asap. I will continue to map for Urt/Q3 as well. I am now seriously considering gathering a small team together to create a game/games for the GBA to further game design skills. All this attention requires lots of time, so I will update the pond as much as possible.
Then I tried light blending with q3map_lightimage, which worked out like cheesecake. I tweaked around with the surfaceLight on this to see what differences I could make. Then, I looked at the model of my computer. The textures imply a reflection of light, so I put a lightimage on the side texture. There wasn't any real noticable difference, but I can see in the future how I could add extra detail to things. Just how my mind works, I'm starting to scheme up different kinds of tricks that I could make a shader do. I ran the Doom3 alpha to see what new tricks the future holds. One of the more clever and simple tricks was taking an image of a control room with colored lights and other technical looking things, then using that image as a virtual reflection on the window at the edge of the room. Obviously not hard to do, but interesting though. I'm trying to figure out what I could do to duplicate the metal shader they have. We'll see how that works out. My eye is most certainly on Doom3, as I will make almost an immediate switch to Doom3 mapping when it comes out. Lastly, since Gtk is always bugging me somehow, I gave Quark a shot. I quickly determined I was not in the mood for another 2 week learning curve. :)
In other news, Kag informs me his project is going pretty well too, as he is almost finished with his ferris wheel. It will be interesting to see what he's come up with! In lurking around #urbanmappers, someone brought up this page which appears to have a bountiful source of mapping and design related links. You should sign your nick on the left if you like the pond!
Wow, now that you've played that, you'll realize that you now are part of the revolution of PUNCHMAN!! HAHAAAHAHAA!! Wait. No, that doesn't work at all. lol. So, for your 17 seconds of amusement, go grab the .exe and have some fun, you and a friend. You might like it. You might distro it. It won't break your computer, and if it does, your fault. Yeah, good stuff.
My very special guests were FSK405 Resident, SS.KAG*Enforcer*USA, .223|Apoofoof, and FSK405 P. After some technical difficulties, we were able to get the map up and running. I had made a quick change just before I uploaded the pk3, changing the map name from "momentum.pk3" to "ut_momentum_beta01.pk3". I didn't realize the .arena file relies on the naming convention. The map name in the .arena file must match up to the pk3 file name. A small but significant mistake. I started by showing Resident around my place, then the others joined up. At this point, the first flaw or at least unaccounted for problem occurs - I have 4 spawn points and 5 people joined up. Uh oh! So I kicked it into spec for a while while unspeakable carnage ravaged my livingroom. Someone got the bright idea to drop nades at respawn and dive into the kitchen while everyone else became wallpaper. LOL. I never imagined playing TS in my house, and sniping my computer room from my bedroom was also a weird scene. Then the smoke nades flew, and considering my place isn't big enough for 4 people, things got even more amusing. Overall, a huge success for my very first beta release. =) Only other problems that popped up was a missing texture, and missing tga file for the minimap. After almost an hour of trashing my place, KAG and I stuck around and played some Rommel. The knockback was a bit tweaked, so we ended up playing it to our advantage. A must-see demo. Putting the pk3 file together was easy. I used the tutorial at the 6th floor, and it took only a couple minutes if that. One other bit of news, Oswald reports that there will soon be a heaping 32 new skyboxes available for public consumption. This is GREAT news. Not having to build a skybox is one less thing I have to worry about right now. I'd rather be figuring out shaders than trying to create a skybox at this moment. If anyone wants to check out my first beta, look to your left and reach into the pond. Next page |
